Harry followed Pillette’s pickup truck from Winchester Square to Agawam, staying three cars behind, sometimes four. The truck was easy to spot ahead in the traffic. Pillette turned onto an industrial strip—NAPA Auto Parts, Best Value Hardwoods (Floor Laying, Refinishing & Resurfacing), Tri-State Show Stock, SecureCo Alarm Systems, SESBG (Dedicated to Serving Small Business), Affordable Self Storage (Friendly, Fences, Gated, Paved, Well Lit, Cameras), a small cement-block envelope factory. (The sign: An envelope the size of a town car. Below it, an LED running display: Business envelopes. Everyday mailing needs. Economical, security tinted, gummed, self-sealing, strip flap. Plain, window, double-window … Through our windows, you can see the future.) He pulled into a chain-link-enclosed parking lot for a strip club, Angel’s Lap. A blue and pink—nursery colors—neon sign showed a naked, winged, pouting woman straddling a faceless male figure.
Harry parked across the street, halfway down the block.
He let Pillette enter Angel’s and listened to two songs on John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey’s Radio Delux—“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and an old recording of Slim and Slam’s “Tutti Fruitti”—before he followed Pillette into the strip club, ducking to get through the basement entrance and shouldering through the clacking beaded curtain.
Harry paused to survey the room as he grabbed a handful of white mints from a bowl by the cash register.
“People use the urinal,” the Bouncer-Greeter said, “don’t wash their hands, then stick their paws in the mints.”
The mints had a blue stripe around the middle. Harry spilled the mints into his jacket pocket.
“They did a study,” said the Bouncer-Greeter, a spherical man, his belly the size of a medicine ball. “You don’t want to know what’s in the mints.”
“Who’s they?” Harry popped a mint into his mouth. “People always say they did this, they did that.…”
The beads clacked as someone entered and passed behind Harry.
“Haven’t you wondered if they might be us?” Harry asked. “Us if we took another path in our past. If you, for example, got interested in mints, candy, free candy—maybe when you were a kid, maybe when you—you know, all kids do—pinched a Sky Bar. Which section did you like best? Caramel, vanilla, peanut, or fudge? The peanut always seemed out of place. Like a food. Peanut. The rest were strictly candy. Fudge, vanilla, caramel. But peanut … Yellow wrapper, red letters. I loved Sky Bars. You had your people—maybe they’re the people who people always say people say—your people who preferred Trudeau’s Seven Up. ‘Seven Delicious Varieties in One Bar.’ Seven. Too much, right? Who can remember the seven. Caramel, yeah, that’s easy. I think they had caramel. Fudge? Maybe. Seven’s too many choices. Too many choices leads to paralysis. You think it had anything to do with 7UP, the soda? There’s something to think about. How many candy bars shared a name with a soda? Seven Up, Sky Bar, when you ate them did you start at one end and work your way through? But then which end to start with? Or did you break the sections apart and eat them in some other order? Or no order at all? Or did you only get them when you could share them? Different sections, seems like you should be sharing. You definitely had to share a Three Musketeers. ‘All for one’ and that. But Three Musketeers—you didn’t have the problem of choice. All three sections tasted the same. Sky Bar, Seven Up—they were existential candy!”
“Yeah,” the Bouncer-Greeter said, grinning. “Sky Bar. You the man.”
The dim room was damp and smelled like a locker room. Despite the No Smoking signs, smoke swirled in the colored lights. Men sat alone or in small groups along the runway or at small tables, some mesmerized by the stripper who hung by her legs upside down from a pole, one knee akimbo, her hands caressing her body, others arguing about the Sox or the Celtics. One guy sat, back to the stage to get the light, working on a newspaper Sudoku. In front of every guy were half a dozen empty glasses and one or two full ones—two-drink minimum.
“You know the first stripper to caress her own body?” Harry asked, his head tilted, smiling at the stripper, who smiled upside down at Harry. “Hinda Wausau. In the twenties. Claimed she invented stripping. One of the three great arts invented by America. Stripping, the cartoon strip, and jazz.”
“No shit?” the stripper said, flipping upright. “Art, huh?”
“Put your hands together for Janine,” the disk jockey said, stifling a yawn. “Janine, at the back bar. Sarabeth, main stage. Let’s show Janine how much we liked her dance. On deck—Shady Sadie.”
The manager—Doreen, thirties, a face with sharp planes as if sheared from shale, leopard-print bra and panties, tattoos of snakes and vines down both arms, tattooed tears below her left eye—hurried over to Harry.
“Behind the VIP curtain,” Doreen said. “Poor dope can’t get the flag up the flagpole. Blames the stripper. Refuses to pay. Refuses to go.”
“What’s he waiting for?” Harry asked.
“A miracle,” Doreen said.
“People come out to have fun,” another Bouncer said, short, square, “and we end up cleaning up their mess.”
“You are PD, aren’t you?” Doreen asked Harry.
“Private,” Harry said.
“We have a deal with you?” Doreen asked.
“‘Down these mean streets…,’” Harry quoted Raymond Chandler.
“Whatever,” Doreen said. “As long as it doesn’t come off the top. The cops aren’t here. You are. My gorillas look tough, but one is too pilled up to fight and the other has a glass jaw. A love tap—and he’s down for the count. My third guy doesn’t want to tear a fingernail. New manicure. Why are they in the business? Bottom line: We need the help. And you can take your fee out in trade.”
Harry crossed the club with Doreen. The flashing lights made it seem as if the tattooed snakes slithered up Doreen’s arms. Turning a corner into a dogleg hallway, they came to a crowd—strippers in easy-off dresses, a few waitresses, a third bouncer—hanging around outside the door to a VIP room.
Harry ducked into the small space. Doreen lagged behind him, trying to see around him. A stripper in a turquoise chemise.
“Chevy,” Doreen said, “this is—”
“Harry,” Harry said.
Doreen squeezed into the room, standing close enough for Harry to feel the brush of her breasts.
Pillette sat, naked except for his red boots, on a burgundy velvet couch. His cock, uncircumcised, hung between his thighs. He had the biggest, hairiest balls Harry had ever seen.
“Geeze,” Pillette said, eyeing Harry. “Perfect.”
“Rat grabbed me so hard,” Chevy said, “I got a bruise.”
She showed her upper arm.
“Okay, Lazarus,” Harry said, “you’re not going to rise from the dead tonight.”
“Bait-and-switch is what we got here,” Pillette said—to Doreen, not to Harry, whom he ignored.
“She gave you what she promised,” Doreen said. “Not her fault you didn’t take advantage of the opportunity.”
“That’s some bruise,” Harry said.
“She had it when I met her,” Pillette said.
“You got two choices,” Harry said. “You leave nicely or—”
Pillette lurched up, dragged on his pants—which got stuck on his boots—and, trailing his shirt, pushed his way out of the room.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Doreen asked Harry.
“A lap dance?” Chevy asked.
Harry shook his head no.
“A girl,” Chevy said, “can dream.”